2014-03-05

MariaDB & MySQL community event 2014 in Santa Clara

I am happy to announce that the MariaDB Foundation is organising a MariaDB & MySQL community event in Santa Clara on Thursday the 3rd of April. The venue is the Hilton Santa Clara hotel, a short walk from the Percona Live 2014 event.

The community event is hosted by the MariaDB Foundation with support from AccelerationDB. This is a free community event to complement the Percona Live event. The community event will be a full day focusing on many things that are not presented at Percona Live.

If you are coming to the community event, why not also go to the expo hall ($75) in the convention center as well and support all the vendors there.

We were partly inspired to do this by Baron Schwartz blog post announcing the Percona Performance conference in 2009. We believe that there should be more free conferences about MariaDB and MySQL that will allow anyone to participate. Personally I would also like to see more conferences where the speakers are drawn from all the people that create and continue to innovate in the technology, rather than conferences where a majority of the speakers come from a single company.

The themes for this community event are MariaDB 10.0 GA, High availability and Performance.

In the next MariaDB & MySQL community event we plan to also host a MariaDB and MySQL bootcamp. We where not able to do it this year because of lack of funding and time (if anyone would like to help us do it this time, please contact me!).

We already have a lot of proposed talks from MariaDB developers, Galera developers and some other active community members.
Topics include:

Connect, storage engine that allows you to talk with the world (Oracle, PostgreSQL, files etc...)

Galera overview and case studies

Show case how to insert continuously 1M rows/seconds while doing concurrent reads with MariaDB and ScaleDB

How we optimized MariaDB; True case studies from the programmers vault

MySQL MHA and Continuent Tungsten shootout 2.0

MariaDB multi source replication capability

Scaling MySQL (case study)

Using ROLES to get more security

We are still looking for more speakers from different companies to make this the best free and community driven MariaDB and MYSQL event in 2014! If you want to talk at the community event, please send an email to 'foundation 'at' mariadb (dot) org'.

We will also organise a dinner that will happen on the same Thursday at the Taste restaurant, a very cool place right around the corner from Birks and Pedros. As the event is free, you will need to pay for the food but we hope to get some further sponsorships for some free drinks (in addition to the inevitable black vodka).

You can use the 'foundation 'at' mariadb (dot) org' email address if you want to sponsor the community event. As MariaDB foundation is a non profit organisation, all sponsorships will go to pay for the event venue, hotel and travel for speakers (who could not otherwise afford to attend); in the event there's anything left over the Foundation will use it for further community activities.

Why is this on Thursday and not Monday (a completely available day)?? Last year I enjoyed the MariaDB day but I've paid for my Percona Live ticket and feel I'm missing out, not being able to attend both. :(

Why not run it on the Monday? It seems an odd decision for the community to run it side by side on the Thursday.

You said:

"We were partly inspired to do this by Baron Schwartz blog post announcing the Percona Performance conference in 2009."

Wasn't this because Percona were effectively frozen out of the conference? With members on the committee and a relatively high number of talks accepted, this isn't really comparable is it?

You said:

"Personally I would also like to see more conferences where the speakers are drawn from all the people that create and continue to innovate in the technology, rather than conferences where a majority of the speakers come from a single company."

Isn't creating a conference where a majority of the speakers come from a single company exactly what you're doing?

The reason for choosing Thursday was to make it easy for community members that don't want to participate in Percona Live to attend the MariaDB community event and also visit the vendors at the expo hall. The vendors is doing a lot of good in the MariaDB and MySQL ecosystem and it's good to be able to talk with them.

Yes, it's true that the initial reason for Baron's post was that Percona was frozen out from the conference. I did back then go to O'Reilly and complain about this and was part of getting Percona back into the MySQL event.

In some sense things are similar now as they were back then. Percona did not give the MariaDB Foundation a single talk, keynote or even a MariaDB.org booth.

The main point is however that it's not good to have one company in charge of an event that is regarded as a user and community event. It's time to change things around and start creating a free venue where everyone can participate on equal terms, without discrimination.

As you can see on the current schedule at https://mariadb.org/en/community-events/, every single talk comes from a different company.

Yes, there are some talks about MariaDB from companies who are members to the MariaDB foundation. There are even more talks from companies who have sponsored the MariaDB foundation in the past.

However there are no talks from any employee from the MariaDB Foundation at the Percona conference.

Having a member or sponsor of the MariaDB foundation talk at some conference, is not the same thing as having a person employed at the MariaDB Foundation give a talk.

MariaDB foundation is a non profit company who is driving the MariaDB project and who is working closely with the MariaDB developer community. To be able to do this work we need to have an independent voice. Without a voice, we can't guarantee that MariaDB will stay as an active, community develop product.